Amp Your LinkedIn Profile with AI

A guide to improving your online professional presence

October 05, 2023

Last week, we covered how AI can help with hiring and recruiting. This week, LinkedIn announced some major new AI features they’re adding for recruiters and HR professionals. Today, we’re going to cover how job seekers or anyone looking to amp up their professional online presence can leverage AI!

Step 1: Highlight your top accomplishments

While no one wants to read your entire resume on your LinkedIn, sharing more context about your major wins provides a lot more context to your profile viewers than just adding each company you’ve worked at and your title. Since you likely already have a resume, you can upload it to ChatGPT using the Advanced Data Analysis feature and have it optimize your accomplishments for LinkedIn. Here’s a prompt you can use as a starting point:

I would like you to act as my expert in personal branding. You excel at highlighting my accomplishments in a meaningful yet humble way. You do not use awkward or overly flowery language, but rather write straightforwardly and professionally. Your audience is my LinkedIn network, consisting of professionals primarily in the [your industry]. My current objective is to find a new job doing [add the job you’re looking for and skills you are looking to utilize], so keep that in mind when writing. In a minute, I am going to ask you to help me optimize the resume I’ve uploaded for LinkedIn. For each position I have held, I would like you to write a short (2-4 sentence) description that summarizes my experience from a value-based perspective. Only highlight the most meaningful bullet points for each position that match with my objective, and don’t force yourself to include each and every bullet point. Do you have any questions before we begin?

Now just upload your current resume, and see what the AI comes up with. Work collaboratively to provide feedback - eg. change the tone of voice, focus on demonstrating more specific skills, etc. Then just make any edits and paste into the description section of your LinkedIn profile for each position.

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Step 2: Add a bio

Luckily, LinkedIn has launched an AI bio-writing feature for the About section. Now that your profile has the right amount of details in it with proper positioning, you’re set up to successfully use this feature. Having a bio (and a complete LinkedIn profile in general) is important for your visibility on the platform, in addition to recruiters and hiring managers in general to see if you’re a good candidate. The About section helps set the stage for how viewers will interpret the rest of your experience, so make sure yours is representative of who you are, your skills, your interests and goals. Make sure it’s not generic and doesn’t use fluffy, meaningless language (eg. “I’m a seasoned leader and strategic thinker) as that’s not helping anyone really understand what’s unique about you. If the LinkedIn AI doesn’t do a great job, head on over to ChatGPT and prompt it for a 1 paragraph bio summarizing the accomplishment summaries it just generated.

Step 3: Make your headline stand out

Here’s where we can really see the power of AI. Great LinkedIn headlines tend to follow a format that isn’t exactly prose. Luckily, we can provide examples (here are some you can leverage) based on what you’re optimizing for, and have it generate one for us based on our resume, experience summary, and bio with the proper output format. A prompt might look like:

Given what we have discussed so far and leveraging my resume, the job experience summaries, and my LinkedIn bio, I would like you to generate a headline for my profile. It must be under 120 characters. Below are examples of great headlines, please follow the same format:

CEO & Co-Founder @ DocToc, building the future of Healthcare | Ex-Google, Meta, Stripe Product Leader | Startup mentor, community builder, connection maker

Senior Product Leader looking for next adventure in Media, TelCom, or News | Former MSNBC, Netflix, and Disney | Mt. Kilimanjaro climber

Of course, the examples you provide should be ones that you would like to emulate. If you’re a job seeker, you might want to be clear about that so you stand out to recruiters. If you’re looking to do more public speaking, mention your keynote and conference speaking skills in your headline. The headline is what appears about you on the LinkedIn homepage and search results, so it’s key to make a great first impression!

PS - I need to follow my own guidance and improve my experience descriptions, but connect with me on LinkedIn and mention you’re a subscriber!

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